I probably wouldn’t have taken Richard J. Light’s course, “Reflecting on Your Life,” when I was an immature 18-year-old college kid. In fact, based on the five exercises from his course described in this article, a more apt title might be “How College Can Help You Get What You Want Out of Life.” But given that over 100 Harvard students enrolled this past year, it’s clear he doesn’t need my titling advice.
Light is a professor at Harvard and the author of Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds, a book I profiled in a past post. But I think the first exercise in the previous article is a good one for high school students, too.
Put simply, make a list of how you spend your time, then see whether or not the items on the list align with your goals.
Here’s an example. Students often tell us they’re interested in studying engineering. But that stated goal doesn’t always match how they’re currently spending their time.
A student who’s on the Science Olympiad team, who takes a college level math course over the summer, who spends her lunch hours working through complex problem sets with her similarly math-obsessed friends–her goals clearly align with the way she’s choosing to spend her time. But the student who hasn’t stretched himself in the available math curriculum, who has no math or science related activities—there’s a disconnect in place. We don’t just worry whether or not he’s qualified for engineering programs; we also have to question whether or not he would actually be happy if he were in one.
I don’t think a 17-year-old needs a life plan. There’s nothing wrong with a teenager just being a teenager, choosing things she enjoys today, and leaving her future to be determined once she moves into a dorm on a college campus. In fact, the right college can be a wonderful place to discover your life path.
But a sure path towards stress and uncertainty—in both college admissions and life—is to spend your time in a way that doesn’t align with your goal. Rather than change what you do to match the goal, you might consider changing the goal to match what you do.
More on this, including a link to Mark Cuban’s post on the same topic, can be found in this past post.